Friday, November 30, 2007

Dems need to Kick it Old School and Kick Out the Clintons

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network 11/30/07

The most important thing that has to happen in politics between now and 2012 is that the generations need to shift. Both the Democrats and the Republicans alike have to leave it all behind. Ron Paul has opened a gate for the Republicans but the Democrats are still in a quandary. For the Democrats to get a fresh start, they need to leave the Clintons behind.

The invasion of Iraq was a Republican initiative but it was fully enabled by weak Democratic leadership, benign attention and implicit support from the most important and influential Democrats, especially President Clinton and Senator Clinton, who then and now had the greatest impact on public opinion.

Today President Clinton says in the WaPost that he ". . . opposed Iraq from the beginning."

The issue is well reported on the Virginia political blog Raising Kaine. Among quotes to the contrary, these are from June 23, 2004 (CNN):

“I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over.”

“That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for.”

It was a disappointed to read this morning in the Time magazine piece that Obama would consider including President Clinton in his cabinet. That makes two of the leading Democrats who would include President Clinton in their cabinets.

I first went to Mark Warner several years ago because I saw the new century opening up from either Mark Warner or Mitt Romney. This I gleaned from a national Governor's Council meeting several years ago, where Warner and Romney both brought forth their long-term visions. Both were sound visions of encouraging youth education and training and both were primarily management-based perspectives by two of the best managers of important states. They presented new paradigms and Warner especially promised to work "across the isle" has he had done as Governor of Virginia. They were both new voices. They both wanted to be President.

Generational dynamics demand that the paradigms shift entirely between generations. You can’t make your kids like Perry Como if they are already listening to Bob Dylan. Generational dynamics demand that the old be left behind so the new can rise. For example, today in the NYTs and in the LA Times yesterday, the great quarterback Brett Favre was referred to as "the last American hero" (LA) and Texas quarterback Tony Romo referred to as "The new Brett Favre" (NYTs). These are end-game comments - they mark the end of a generation of action of passion. They come because the New England quarterback, Tom Brady, was referred to as "God" on the cover of last months' Sports Illustrated, and because Brady, Randy Moss and Wes Welker have entirely changed the game of football. In football, an old era and an old generation is ending and a new era and a new generation has started.

Likewise, generational dynamics can be seen as the difference between Perry Como, Jimmy Durante and kind and the rise of Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Seasons pass. In fact, Dylan’s record company initially resisted playing Like a Rolling Stone because they knew it would change the season and their old list would recede. Dylan surreptitiously had it played in a famous New York disco to get it to radio stations.

Today we are directly between seasons again. Mark Warner and Jim Webb started a new season for the Democrats. It is not that the previous season was "bad" - just that new generations need to define themselves on their own terms. The problem for the Democrats today is that Elvis – and his relatives – won’t leave the building. But sending up kin or relatives to do the job – Elisabeth Dole, Hillary, George W. Bush – is always the sign that the generational season is in late November, early December.

When I was writing about Warner and Webb two years ago Markos of DKos had an important and influential piece in the WaPost declaring a division in the Democrats and mentioning Mark Warner and Howard Dean as "new Democrats" or representative of a new generation of Democrats. These divisions need to happen. In that same period he had a post on DKos asking "Won't these Clinton-era Democrats ever go away?" This is a representative voice of the new generation. The question has to be asked again today if Obama is going to bring Clinton-era Democrats into his cabinet.

The Democrats can define a completely new generation today with Warner, Webb, and others - I would include Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and possibly John Lynch of New Hampshire who has defined his Governorship as "across-the-isle" like Mark Warner's and who has long admired Warner as Governor.

Jim Webb diametrically opposed the "Rubin Democrats" and their purpose in his rebuttal to Bush's State of the Union speech last February. This was implicit criticism of the Clinton-era Democrats. Webb was of course referring to Robert Rubin, the Clinton Secretary of Treasury, when he used the phrase "Rubin Democrats" although these might be considered "Jerry Rubin Democrats" since Sixties-radical-turned-Wall-St.-mogul Jerry Rubin first proposed this shift.

But this new direction from Webb, embraced by John Edwards as well, is not in opposition to all Democrats. It is Old School and pre-Clinton. And William Strauss and Neil Howe, who write about generational shifts in history, make the point that it is characteristic of the new generation to jump over the last to grandmother’s and grandfather’s generation.

The Clinton administration directly and intentionally opposed the older and wiser voices of their own party and followed instead the likes of Jerry Rubin who in the mid-Sixties advised his generation to go home and kill their parents and in the next decade told them that " . . . wealth creation is the real American revolution."

John Kenneth Galbraith, a venerable Nobel laureate and party icon from the Kennedy days, wrote a book in 1992, The Culture of Contentment, in direct opposition to Clinton's attachment to the rich and his economic policies which created a new class of the wealthy among people almost exclusively of his own generation. (Galbraith wrote late in life that he only briefly met Clinton and co. They basically had no use for him and he suggested that the feeling was mutual.)

They opposed George Kennan as well, possibly America’s greatest diplomat since Franklin, who opposed the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders when Russia was considered weak and broken after the fall of the Soviets. This incursion was first proposed by Newt Gingrich in his Contract for America but was vigorously advanced by the Clinton administration. Kennan called it "a mistake of historic proportions." Today, as President Putin cancels an arms treaty with the West and promises to push military forces to that same region, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Webb and Edwards honor the Old School and the old traditions. I had hoped that Obama would as well, because that will be the path of the new generation.

In August, I interviewed the chief-of-staff of possibly the wisest and most venerable of the Old School, Sam Nunn of Georgia. He and Senator Lugar had just returned from Russia to mark the 15th anniversary of Nunn-Lugar work with Russia and the former Soviet Union to secure nuclear weapons and materials. Nunn, a retired Democratic Senator, has worked tirelessly to reduce the threat of nuclear warfare and in 2001 joined Ted Turner to found the Nuclear Threat Initiative. I was told that he is so dissatisfied with the line up of both parties on these issues that he may enter as a third party candidate in January.

What a Democrat needs to do - and now it should be Edwards if Obama is going to bring Bill Clinton into his cabinet - is to reaffirm the old traditions which Galbraith, Kennan and Nunn represented. To bring back the character of the Old School and leave the Clinton-era behind.

The invasion of Iraq was fully enabled by the weak leadership, benign attention and implicit support of the most important and influential Democrats, especially President Clinton and Senator Clinton, who then and now had the greatest impact on public opinion among Democrats.

Today President Clinton says in the WaPost that he ". . . opposed Iraq from the beginning."

The issue is well reported on at Raising Kaine. Among quotes to the contrary, these from June 23, 2004 (CNN):

"I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over."

"That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for."

Here in northern New Hampshire I've been working as a volunteer for Barack Obama who, like Jim Webb, the new Senator from Virginia, and Robert C. Byrd, the old one from West Virginia, opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start. But I was disappointed to read this morning in the Time magazine piece that Obama would consider including President Clinton in his cabinet. That makes two of the leading Democrats who would include President Clinton in their cabinets. Might have to go back to John Edwards and Mudcat Saunders.

I think the most important thing that has to happen between now and 2012 is that the generations need to shift. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have to leave it behind. And for the Democrats, that means leaving the Clintons behind.

I first went to Mark Warner several years ago because I saw the new century opening up from either Mark Warner or Mitt Romney. I still do. This I gleaned from the annual Governor's Council meeting in '05, I think, where Warner and Romney both brought forth their long-term visions. Both were sound visions of encouraging youth education and training and both were primarily management-based perspectives by two of the best managers of important states. They presented new paradigms and Warner especially promised to work "across the isle" has he had done as Governor of Virginia. They were both new voices. They both wanted to be President.

Generational dynamics demand that the paradigms shift entirely between generations. You can’t make your kids like Perry Como if they are already listening to Bob Dylan. Generational dynamics demand that the old be left behind so the new can rise. For example, today in the NYTs and in the LA Times yesterday, the great quarterback Brett Favre was referred to as "the last American hero" (LA) and Texas quarterback Tony Romo referred to as "The new Brett Favre" (NYTs). These are end-game comments - they mark the end of a generation of action of passion. They come because the New England quarterback, Tom Brady, was referred to as "God" on the cover of last months' Sports Illustrated, and because Brady, Randy Moss and Wes Welker have entirely changed the game of football. In football, an old era and an old generation is ending and a new era and a new generation has started.

Likewise, generational dynamics can be seen as the difference between Perry Como, Jimmy Durante and kind and the rise of Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Seasons pass. In fact, Dylan’s record company initially resisted playing Like a Rolling Stone because they knew it would change the season and their old list would recede. Dylan surreptitiously had it played in a famous New York disco to get it to radio stations.

Today we are directly between seasons again. Mark Warner and Jim Webb start a new season for the Democrats. It is not that the previous season was "bad" - just that new generations need to define themselves on their own terms. The problem for the Democrats today is that Elvis – and his relatives – won’t leave the building. But sending up kin or relative to do the job – Elisabeth Dole, Hillary, George W. Bush – is always the sign that the generational season is in late November, early December.

When I was writing about Warner and Webb two years ago Markos of DKos had an important and influential piece in the WaPost declaring a division in the Democrats and mentioning Mark Warner and Howard Dean as "new Democrats" or representative of a new generation of Democrats. These divisions need to happen. In that same period he had a post on DKos asking "Won't these Clinton-era Democrats ever go away?" This is a representative voice of the new generation. The question has to be asked again today if Obama is going to bring Clinton-era Democrats into his cabinet.

The Democrats can define a completely new generation today with Warner, Webb, and others - I would include Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and possibly John Lynch of New Hampshire who has defined his Governorship as "across-the-isle" like Mark Warner's and who has long admired Warner as Governor.

Jim Webb diametrically opposed the "Rubin Democrats" and their purpose in his rebuttal to Bush's State of the Union speech last February. This was implicit criticism of the Clinton-era Democrats who detached Wall St. and the financial markets from the actual performance of the economy in the traditional Republican fashion. Webb was of course referring to Robert Rubin, the Clinton Secretary of Treasury, when he used the phrase "Rubin Democrats" although these might be considered "Jerry Rubin Democrats" since Sixties-radical-turned-Wall-St.-mogul Jerry Rubin first proposed this shift.

But this new direction from Webb, embraced by John Edwards as well, is not in opposition to all Democrats. It is Old School and pre-Clinton. And William Strauss and Neil Howe, who write about generational shifts in history, make the point that it is characteristic of the new generation to jump over the last to grandmother’s and grandfather’s generation.

The Clinton administration directly and intentionally opposed the older and wiser voices of their own party and followed instead the likes of Jerry Rubin who in the mid-Sixties advised his generation to go home and kill their parents and in the next decade told them that " . . . wealth creation is the real American revolution."

John Kenneth Galbraith, a venerable Nobel laureate and party icon from the Kennedy days, wrote a book in 1992, The Culture of Contentment, in direct opposition to Clinton's attachment to the rich and his economic policies which created a new class of the wealthy among people almost exclusively of his own generation. (Galbraith wrote late in life that he only briefly met Clinton and co. They basically had no use for him and he suggested that the feeling was mutual.)

They opposed George Kennan as well, possibly America’s greatest diplomat since Franklin, who opposed the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders when Russia was considered weak and broken after the fall of the Soviets. This incursion was first proposed by Newt Gingrich in his Contract for America but was vigorously advanced by the Clinton administration. Kennan called it "a mistake of historic proportions." Today, as President Putin cancels an arms treaty with the West and promises to push military forces to that same region, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Webb and Edwards honor the Old School and the old traditions. I had hoped that Obama would as well, because that will be the path of the new generation.

In August, I interviewed the chief-of-staff of possibly the wisest and most venerable of the Old School, Sam Nunn of Georgia. He and Senator Lugar had just returned from Russia to mark the 15th anniversary of Nunn-Lugar work with Russia and the former Soviet Union to secure nuclear weapons and materials. Nunn, a retired Democratic Senator, has worked tirelessly to reduce the threat of nuclear warfare and in 2001 joined Ted Turner to found the Nuclear Threat Initiative. I was told that he is so dissatisfied with the line up of both parties on these issues that he may enter as a third party candidate in January.

What a Democrat needs to do - and now it should be Edwards if Obama is going to bring Bill Clinton into his cabinet - is to reaffirm the old traditions which Galbraith, Kennan and Nunn represented. To bring back the character of the Old School and leave the Clinton-era behind.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Comment to Mr. Cavett's column in the NYTs 11/26/07

Vintage Mailer. For all the gruff and hostile performance art, he (Norman Mailer) was remarkably kind and generous to us rustic provincials. In the late ‘70s I randomly sent him a manuscript for a novel and to my surprise he sent it to his publisher. Over the years I continued to send him things and he always responded with wry and witty comments and occasionally drawings and illustrations, including a caricature of Ronald Reagan admiring President Bush. After 9/11 I wrote to him at Provincetown and asked him to speak up. I received a drawing back of a Cyclops with giant genitals. It read: “So, I said to Aeschylus ‘You don’t understand the nature of Greek drama.’”

Monday, November 19, 2007

Ron Paul and Mitt Romney: Why is Japan Killing the Whales?

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 11/19/07

The 2008 Presidential race will bring an end to Clinton-era Soccer Mom politics. No longer will everyone get a trophy. No longer can just anyone and their wife, secretary or auntie be President, Senator, Supreme Court Justice or Attorney General. The price of incompetence mounts daily. Virtual disaster is at hand and there is real potential now for America to fall into third world status.

In Soccer Mom America everybody got a chance. Married six times? Outstanding bench warrants in Nashville? Sexual assault charges still lingering in limbo in Arkansas? Fail to pass the bar in D.C.? Don’t know how to file income tax yet? Hard time for trafficking in Florida? Not a problem. Everybody gets a trophy. You can even be President and with the proper stylist and consultants the fact that your only education was as a free-church preacher in the taking-up-serpents churches in the hollows of Appalachia can spin to your advantage: On that free-basing cocaine and dog fighting conviction you can play the Born Again card.

No more. Nature demands – survival demands – a return to the aptitudes and abilities of the very best among us.

Elsewhere, away from of the dreary night of politics, a sea change is being marked by astonishing gifted athletes Tom Brady, Randy Moss, Wes Welker and the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick who brought them together. They have changed football as Bob Dylan and The Beatles changed music. And likewise they will change our world and our generations. Necessity will demand that that same level of surly New England excellence that Belichick brings to football be brought to everything we do in the world including politics and government, lest we fall into a chasm between Asia and Europe.

And say what you like about him but Mitt Romney brings the same level of management to politics and government that Belichick brings to football.

But Romney will not turn the age although he is likely to manage it: Ron Paul will turn it.

Why are the Japanese killing the whales? Because no one cares what America thinks anymore. The U.S., riding the economic curve out of World War II and on to the end of the century, established post-war values in the world and if the world wanted to play with our football they would play as we played – there was no other option but the commies. Our values; that is, the things that we thought - through vanity possibly or delusion - were the good and great things of the world; from Jefferson and Madison to Cal Kline and Michael Jackson - created the climate the others were to bask in if they hoped to play.

No more. Now they will do what they like and it starts with the Japanese.

Japan understands subtle. Bunraku puppet theater is a masterful dramatic tradition in Japan where the puppets are all surrounded by shadows in black cloaks, which adds a spooky dimension to the action – the players are puppets; they are merely pawns to the shadows and forces unseen from the unconscious. All public action is contrived and symbolic puppet work, artfully placed. Japan acted in Samurai tradition when it yielded in submission to MacArthur; the vanquished in the warrior’s honor tradition submitting its will to the master and victor. They would do what the master demanded: They must become slave and subset to the master and be the master’s will. Play baseball. Turn Christian. Whatever. Stop killing and eating beautiful, sensitive and psychic humpback whales as sushi. Today, the warrior tradition yields. Japan leaves America and MacArthur behind.

Overt symbolism was always important and apparent in relations with the Japanese. Back in the early 1980s when Japanese management strategies became a fashion I remember a discussion by a Japanese diplomat on the McNeil/Lehrer news hour about America turning to the hollow aluminum baseball bats. The diplomat was urging the Victor to show his Valor and the resolute character and resilience which conquered him and his world. He was asking us to again seek excellence, and to be all that we could be. And get rid to the aluminum baseball bat, he said, it is hollow, empty and manufactured. Go back to the wooden and shamanistic Louisville Slugger which represented America when we rose to greatness.

In Robert Christopher’s book, The Japanese Mind, which helped explain Japan to America back then, Christopher made the point that the Japanese had only a few options for success in the globalist post-war world. The one was to tag along on America’s path as America demanded. Another was to find fellowship with a rising China. Today you might add Europe and Russia as well. Such conspicuous public symbolism as beginning again to hunt the humpbacks is certainly not accidental. It is Japan’s Samurai spirit saying to America: We are free from our burden of failure and atonement. You have failed in the Master’s Task: we no longer owe you fealty.

Was bound to happen. And of course, China – still fuming about all those Southern Baptist politicians suddenly madly in love with the Dalai Lama – will try to bring the slowest of deaths now by inching toward Russia and the revolutionary peasants below the border suddenly oil rich. Time to read Sun Tzu again: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable: when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” Now they are dropping T Bills and dollars and trading up for euros and sterling and the world follows as if on the path of a trail of crumbs dropped in the forest. Even rap singers and supermodels are demanding pay in euros.

Ouch. The sudden friendship of the French should have been the tip off. Now the French like us. No one else does.

We are at the end of things and at the beginning of things. The tiresome thing about this Presidential campaign is that it is like watching TV reruns on the high stations; there is Frazier, Seinfeld and the Clintons; there is John McCain in his Old Soldiers uniform recalling wars of those old enough to be grandfathers and great grandfathers.

But things begin as well. I think it is fully possible now for Barack Obama to win this Presidency and I hope he does. I want to see a man whose grandfather lived in an African village become President of the United States. Paul and Obama were the only candidates to instinctively oppose the neocon fantasy in Iraq. Everyone knew it was smoke and mirrors. The politicians Clinton, Kerry and Edwards simply yielded to war fever. It was the first test of management in our century and only Obama and Paul passed.

And in the Senate, only Obama instinctively knew and understood that habeas corpus is the basis of the white man’s long journey from the 12th century to the millennium. He understands in his most primary nature that torture does not call for cutesy comments to the moderator like Hillary’s spine-chilling retort that she’d talk to her husband about his position. (As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, Bill Clinton’s position on torture was the same as his and as Rosa Brooks pointed out in the LA Times last year, Hillary’s was – surprise – the same as her husband’s.) And like Jack Kennedy and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Obama is the only candidate with an unquenchable smile and one which shows a primary life force of joy and belonging.

If Obama does win, he will be a curing, healing President. A President who brings élan and world spirit like a Jack Kennedy or Bobby. Or like the folksy Sunday-school teacher who returned us homeward to ourselves, Jimmy Carter.

But Ron Paul brings a sea change. Never before have ideas like his held swayin America and those ideas have been around for a long time. And never before has New Hampshire seen such a scene with a politician.

The Concord Monitor, in describing the aftermath of a September campaign rally in Manchester, wrote: “Members of the audience chanted his name. Several jumped up and down. Descending from the stage, [Paul] found himself surrounded by supporters snapping cell-phone photographs. Two women turned so Paul could sign the backs of their T-shirts.”

The decline of the dollar and the descent of the American economy into a valley between Asia and Europe brings the end of America’s globalist economic arc in the world. Bush killed it, possibly intentionally. Perhaps he is a closet Libertarian and prefers the city-state or nation-state to world government and globalization based out of Wall St. I’m about 70% thinking he does.

But when things end they don’t die. They turn into something else. And Paul’s popularity is rising because his ideas on economy and culture are suited to the times and suited to the times ahead.

Paul might be what anthropologists call a Monkey King; he is the creator of a new era and inspires new leaders and new paths of leadership. The generation or generations which follow look first to Monkey King. History often forgets their names, like firebrand James Otis who inspired John Adams to revolution or Theodore Parker, the fiery Massachusetts preacher and Yankee crusader who egged Lincoln on to warfare. The leaders who come now in the fourth post-war generation will look to Paul.

And given time, I believe Mitt Romney and the best minds in the Republican Party will look to Ron Paul because the Republican Party has split now between the Paul faction and everybody else. Paul is a natural for the South and Southwest and vocalizes much they have long felt. Paulites and Paulines will rise and advance in red America and in states where small government and states rights are taking new meaning. This is a new historical path and one more suited for the U.S. in the century ahead. It is suited to an America fully formed with rich and indigenous regions which increasingly over the decades will have a less and less need for a federal government, and as California and the Eastern States have directly expressed recently, find the Hamilton tradition of federalism to be an impediment to their progress and prosperity. It is an impediment to excellence.

There is a widely held misunderstanding about Romney – one reflected in a poor article this week in the Washington Post. It is that Romney, because he is a Mormon, will not accept new ideas. I wonder if these people actually watched the 2002 Winter Olympics which Romney took over as President and CEO and rescued it from incompetent leadership. The entertainment was largely run – it seemed to have been commandeered – by Robbie Robertson, a Monkey God of my own generation, who brought the world Woodstock, The Band and Bob Dylan in various guises. Robertson brought in a whole bunch of Canadian First People; women primarily, and had them waving herbs and shouting Indian blessings at the athletes. He brought in great singers and entertainers like Rita Coolidge from the Sixties period. Indeed, it was all a great hippie show leading up to an “Oklahoma” style dramatic presentation on the celestial rise of the White Buffalo, a Native American Indian harbinger of the rising Age of Aquarius.

To the contrary; there may indeed be a positive management aspect of being a Mormon. Here in Massachusetts Romney felt no inherent conflict between Irish Catholic and White Glove Unitarian; a Curse greater than the New York Yankees which had fated the region since Emerson and Parker.

Paul and Romney are fully at odds over Iraq and many other things. But what Romney can do like no other is take a fresh idea and form it, fill it in and contour it to suit the day. We are seeing now in Ron Paul ideas which may not have worked 30 or 50 years ago. But they may be perfectly suited to the times ahead.

Romney’s staff has stated that it is still looking for the single idea as keystone to the Romney campaign and a Romney Presidency. Possibly he will find it in Ron Paul.

The idea of small government in particular, has never been fully formed. Ron Paul speaks to it as did Reagan. As the coffers shrink in big states like California and throughout the U.S., smaller government will become a necessity. But since Reagan, “small government” has meant only thin government. If governments are to lose their wealth and weight, the shape and packaging of government must change.

Government is almost exclusively about packaging. But like the puppets in Bunraku theater, ideas about government are surrounded by spooks and dark shadows - and regionalism conjures ghosts from 1865. However, a regional council for the Katrina region for example, would at least temporarily manage the multifaceted issues of repair, environment and law enforcement that need to be handled together. Only Romney has recognized that “one size fits all” federalism brings widespread incompetence to problems of poverty and prosperity. This begins to travel the path of Paul.

Up here in New Hampshire, the Free State Project people, who I admire and respect, have a simple plan. As one mountain independent put it on her blog, their issues are uncomplicated: “legalize marijuana, end the war, Hillary is a commie . . .” They would have no problem with George Kennan’s desire expressed in his last days, of seeing America divided into 12 working regions. People expect us to behave like that up here; if they tried it in other states the Homies (that would be the Homeland Security) would be on their tails.

But regionalization, seen without spooks and shadows, in no way challenges the entity and essence of the United States, it simply shifts the responsibilities for solving problems to states and regions. It is simply a way of building matrixes for small government; of defunding federalism and repackaging appropriately to the various cultures on the continent without causing chaos and difficulty. It is simply a better package in a continent fully culturized; a matrix for community tier economy and a Jeffersonian vision of family, community and culture.

In truth, community cannot hold in Hamilton’s view in which corporation is primary and its main cell of energy is the individual. In Jefferson’s view it is family, church, region and community tier economy. It is a difference of Particle and Wave, and as we learned from the physicist/shamans of the 1920s and 30s, one can be either a Particle or a Wave, but not both at the same time: In a word, Hamilton and Jefferson are incompatible, but they can alternate, and the one best for some conditions is worse for others. The Jefferson path – the Paulist path – could well be the better package for our rapidly arriving century.

The days of the Soccer Mom are quickly fading. Necessity returns us to excellence as it returns us to our truest nature in the darkest hour. I first spotted the first slouching return to competence and excellence on the TV show House; it is an auspicious harbinger of the age ascending. Dr. House is a genius intuitive with skill derived from his own knowledge, perseverance and experience. He is Master in a sea of self-assured, incompetent, group-think professionals born of management theory and Best Practices conferences. He is universally despised by Organization Man and even crankier than Bill Belichick. He is a cripple, a freak and an outcast in an autonomous and self-sustaining management culture in which everyone is used to getting a trophy.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

“Chicks up front”: Why Hillary Will Support the Draft

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 11/09/07

I take Mitt Romney on face value when he says the all-volunteer army is working and he doesn’t intend to change it. It is in keeping with his nature and all his personal history to manage and improve an existing paradigm rather than to arbitrarily break it and do something else. But what will President Hillary do? I am almost certain by now that she will establish a military draft.

I have traveled in the same river as these people and one of the weirdly random talents I have had in my life is to show up unintentionally at places just when they were getting interesting. Like when Jack Kennedy rose out of my father’s old neighborhood in Boston and ran for President when I was a kid. And when Bob Dylan awakened the Sixties kind of in my high school football field in NewportR.I. Another was in August, 1968. I had just completed a year’s tour of duty in Thailand and began a half world journey; down the mountains and through the jungle by slow train to Bangkok and after a stay for a week or so at five-baht peasant hotels, the flight back to San Francisco. I had just enough travel money left to make it to Chicago.

I ended up sleeping in Union Station for three days, waiting for family to wire some of my cash. I hadn’t a clue what was going on in the U.S. When I arrived in Chicago the city was in turmoil. It was during the riots in the 1968 Democratic Convention.

As it turned out, it was a major turning point for people my age and thousands gathered to protest the war in Vietnam at Lincoln Park and Grant Park. Signs in the crowd read, “Chicks up front,” so the coppers wouldn’t hit so hard, said to have been orchestrated by Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, the main organizer of the event.

It was certainly a time for change for Senator Clinton as well. As reported in a recent NYTs article on the turmoil of '68: "As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise, The Conscience of a Conservative, on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation."

Chicago brought forth a potential American passage; the trial of the Chicago Seven featuring Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dillinger and others followed as denouement. It might have amounted to a change in the way we live in this country: Recently I’ve been sent into a kind of déjà vu as I have heard some of the exact same anti-war phrases by those who opposed the invasion of Iraq and have used some of them myself.

But it didn’t turn out because the hippies and the war resisters did not pass the test of fire: On May 4, 1970, when four were left dead at KentState the party ended. Rubin said in one of his autobiographies that after KentState you couldn’t get girls to type your term papers for you anymore. You couldn’t call them chicks anymore either. Earth Mother had yielded to Wall St. and the corporate culture.

That failure haunts that same generation today because a revolutionary culture cannot change in mid-stream and join the mainstream corporate culture; KentState could have triggered a mass uprising like the Irish Rebellion or the Boxer Rebellion in the last days of Manchu rule. A new culture – a new auspicious world – could have arisen from KentState. But it failed. As such, it cannot well be incorporated in the experience of the individual as a psychological or mythic transition to adulthood. It can only be considered a few years of escapism and play: You cannot really be against the war and be for the soldiers as it is the fashion to say today. You have to be on one side or the other.

That was John Kerry’s problem from the first. He wanted to be one of the hippies . . . and was famously photographed at an anti-war rally with John Lennon . . . and one of the soldiers too; he proudly decorated his office with his military colors. It doesn’t work. The hippies didn’t consider him one of them, nor did some of his fellow soldiers who swift-boated him.

Gary Hart made a better transition. He opposed the war in Vietnam and directed George McGovern’s anti-war candidacy. After the war he became a military officer and a military expert. At all times, including today, he knew who he was. As the invasion of Iraq loomed some of us invited him to come speak here in New England on the topic. His opinion and his prediction of vast and extended warfare across the Middle East was perfectly accurate. Senator Clinton, who should be considered the leading voice of the Democrats at that time, did not listen to him. She listened instead to the focus groups and to the hordes when war fever and revenge were sweeping the country.

Senator Clinton today represents the people of her age who opted-out of the hippie days when its brief allure receded in the smoke at KentState. They followed the path instead to Wall St. with Jerry Rubin and Arkansas po' white Bill was avatar to this transition. Rubin called himself a “pilot fish” to his generation and he is key to the age. Rubin had told them in the Sixties to go home and kill their parents and to avoid investment because, “A hip capitalist is a pig capitalist . . . They are traitors to their long hair." A decade later he would tell them, “Wealth creation is the real American revolution.” And the generational horde followed, like fish.

A problem arises now and has over the years and it is a mythic problem. The Billarys and the Cheneys and Bushs did not participate in the tribal adventure they were sent to as young ‘uns and they all appear to be living out the failed consequences of a myth unfulfilled. Certainly Cheney and the neocons seem to be living out a dangerous fantasy with their war adventures in Iraq and everywhere, but likewise the Dems seem to be unleavened by the tragedies and successes of military experience.

The key question today is how will the Democrats and the Republicans manage the continuing mess in Iraq, Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world? Specifically, will they continue to rely on the professional army which seems heavily indebted to mercenary forces like Blackwater? Or will they establish a draft?

There are two “prisons” here – as Toynbee called them. The one is mythical: She opposed the war in Vietnam which was a primary directive of Kennedy and the country at the time. To do so is in fact a very radical step; in the past, only a very small minority of Quakers or Buddhists here in New England would take it. And they would not change their views on warfare and capital once the inconvenient war was over as Hillary and the Rubin horde has. Hillary has to prove she has manlies to be President. Katty Kay of BBC has offered commentary in that regard; because she is a woman, said Kay. But more so, I would say, because she opposed the war in Vietnam. Having adopted the mainstream direction after the war, the previous position can only be considered a weakness or failure which creates compensation and dangerous instability in later leadership.

The Democrats in this regard are now displaying romanticized notions of the citizen-soldier in World War II and the draftee in Vietnam which I see as a default of intelligent analysis and avoidance of the problem at hand. This romanticizing comes from a lack of personal experience in time of crisis: One can only imagine fair action and judgment in war if there is no personal experience as touchstone, so one makes decisions by feelings and imaginings.

The question of military service popped up here in New Hampshire when Hillary came to talk recently to a group of local editors and reporters. She said to them that she sees no support among the military for a return to the draft.

Unfortunately, that does not answer the question of whether or not she supports the draft, and like oh-so-much she and her husband have said to us over the years; it does not even address the question. We already know that there is no interest in the draft in the military. And if we were unsure we would go and ask them. We want to know what she thinks about the draft and specifically, if she would establish a draft to continue the conflict which, if she, Romney or most of the others are elected, is certain to go on for at least a decade if not much longer.

But she has not answered that question.

Under the circumstance it is probably better to try to get the answer as Greg House, MD, of the clever TV show House does. House never listens to his patients. He assumes they always lie, obfuscate or hide the truth. Instead, he sends his interns out to search their houses and talk to their friends and relatives to find out what is going on.

We might do the same with Bill and Hillary. If we don’t know what they are thinking; if they are congenitally incapable of talking straight, we might look to their friends and those who they would bring with them to the Oval Office if they are elected. It has been suggested in the press that Hillary would bring either Jim Webb, warrior, novelist and the new Senator from Virginia, or General Wesley Clark. I would think that someone like Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas, or Mark Warner, former Governor of Virginia and current candidate for the Senate, would be much better but again, this is compensation – to prove that the Democrats have manlies; to prove it to themselves.

When he ran for Senate Webb was forced to answer if he would support the Democratic candidate “no matter who it is” (meaning Hillary) and he said he would. Clark was among the first to endorse Hillary this Fall and it was felt by some at the time that he had been running for VP with Hillary all along.

In ’04 when he ran for President there was a clear suggestion that he would like the job of Secretary of State. Some of the best commentators have speculated this year that because of the good work he did in the ’06 race for vets running for office and because of the high profile he showed in opposition to a potential invasion of Iran, he is certain to have an important position in any Democratic cabinet, possibly Secretary of State.

When he endorsed Senator Clinton, General Clark said he had known her for 21 years. He is one of Bill’s best friends; I see him as Bill’s “alter ego” – Arkansas guy and fellow Rhodes Scholar.

On July 6, 2004, Clark addressed a small group in Manchester, NH, and said, “I know you all don’t support the draft, but when I heard in the early 1970s that they were thinking of going to an all-volunteer army, I thought, ‘good for the army, bad for the country.’”

He cited the classic argument of a “professional army” as the tool of an elite regime while the draft was the way of an egalitarian, democratic people.

Myself, I find this faulty. Both Hitler and Stalin relied on a draft.

It is an important issue because increasingly, Clark appears to be forming opinion for the Democrats and for the Clintons.

Senator Clinton needs to be asked directly if she is committed to the all-volunteer army as Romney is or if she is in agreement with Wesley Clark on this issue. Which of these will be the law of the land when she is President?

If she doesn’t answer straight, which she won’t, we should press her on who she will bring forth on military issues and make our own assumptions from that.

She certainly believes in registration and told my local reporters that 18-year-old women, along with men should be required to register.

“I think that should be required of everyone in case of a national emergency,” she said. And in a hair-raising aside, she suggested that 9-11 was such an emergency.

“I really believe that Bush could have gotten the nation involved. He chose not to,” she said. “He had a chance after 9-11 to summon America to service and sacrifice, and he didn’t do it.”

She said she would also “like to do more” with national service and presumably everyone could be pressed into “national service” in case of “a national emergency.”

So in a Hillary Presidency, you won’t only have the chance to be pulled out of a card game, as I was, and drafted into the war in Vietnam, but could also be drafted, man or woman, into alternative service; possibly doing laundry at the White House or scrubbing floors at the William J. Clinton Library and Museum in Arkansas.

Some of my madcap, dynamic friends up here in the Free State Project in New Hampshire claim that Hillary is a commie and her yearnings go back to the early days of Trotsky or Lenin in Russia.

Her political vision goes back further than that. It goes back to Peter the Great.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Sarko the Appeaser: France’s New Vichy Regime

- for The Free Market News Network, 11/06/07

As the Congress of Appeasers, Accommodators and Enablers readies to hear France’s new leader, they might prep with a showing of Casablanca. At no time have the Peeps more resembled the vacillating and ineffectual crowd at Rick’s Cafe Americain. Today Charles Schulmer, the Senator for New York, takes out an op-ed in the NYT’s to claim his credibility on voting for Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general, who doesn’t think that half drowning a woman or man with a bag over her head constitutes torture. That is he isn’t sure. Schulmer follows in the footsteps of his Weak Sister from California, Diane Feinstein, who this week also cast her vote for torture with resolute conviction.

Say what you like about France, where I spent some of the best moments of my ‘tweens; it generally knows the difference between love and rape. But that cannot be said about Nicolas Sarkozy, the recently elected President of France.

Truth is, when Sarkozy visited us first off here in New Hampshire after his election we were only vaguely amused. I mean, I’ve been to Paris and I’ve been to Lake Winnipesaukee. If he felt that our live-free-or-die motto suggested that we would follow the horde to Bush’s war against the dark-skinned non-Christians of the world, he completely missed the point. And how ridiculous could it be to run for President of France pretending to emulate those of us in the northern mountains of New Hampshire? Or wearing a NYPD t-shirt?

That his wife slipped back to France under cover of night was the tip off that beneath the veneer of Austrian-Hungary Empire stuff (Sarko’s paternal line. . . startling that the French would even think of going there at all . . . ) France still had instincts.

As it is widely reported, “Sarko the American” as he is known in France, makes his first official visit to Washington today to try to “ . . . heal the wounds over France's opposition to the Iraq war . . . ” He hopes to affirm that he is a sure ally of President Bush in his most trying hour.

Good to have a friend, even one who fauns. Will Bush laugh at him when he speaks French as he did in New Hampshire? Reports tell us that there is a “collective swoon” in the Oval Office over this Frenchman. That should be a tip off: This President, like most Texans, hates France and everything about France and always did. Why do they like this Frenchman?

It seems so long ago now but as I recall, it was Donald Rumsfeld that called Bush’s New World Order, “old Europe” and “new Europe.” New Europe consisted of our vassal state England, our two pseudo-American states Poland (created by recent American immigrants in New York and Maryland) and the CzechRepublic (created by American lost-in-the-ozone poet numbsculls in the English Department), Turkey and someplace else about the size of Ellis Island with a name I can’t pronounce. I got the willies at the time because at the beginning Bush’s plan – the pre-emptive policy – seemed coined originally by Wilhelm II and the only main allies at the time were England and Italy. Then when Rumsfeld got on the Jim Lehrer show to talk about how Hitler nationalized the German economy, his arms started waving and he got really animated, much like General ‘Buck” Turginson (that would be George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove.

Today, Poland, governed by twins - which is a nice touch for a country that can’t remember who it is - is opting out as it realizes that the price of being a pseudo-American Euro-state is high, and that these “new Europe” satellites are merely Gurka forces – Foreign Devils fighting on our behalf – in our global war on Islam and missile sites to territorialize Russia.

Now England is entirely screwed; it is neither Euro nor American and will now be continually cursed by its direct neighbors because it cast its lot with Bush. Turkey is now among our greatest enemies. And General What’s-His-Name in Pakistan, hoping to develop a new nazi-burgher class globally, is about to lose his funny CIA money.

But, alors, now here in the darkest hour, France comes to our aid.

Congress should turn this man out: He comes to us as Marshall Petain came to France. As you recall, when the messenger from the French Underground was shot down at the beginning of Casablanca, he fell beneath a large portrait of Marshall Petain, who accommodated the German invaders in the Vichy regime. Likewise Sarkozy accommodates and appeases today a President without moral bearings and a Congress without a backbone.

We are now at a Vichy moment; a moment like that portrayed in the movie Casablanca, about an incident at Rick’s Café American which turned the world from accommodation to character. Today we are all Monsieur Rick, tormented and torn between man and mouse, waiting for the man of courage and valor and resolute conviction to arrive and order the playing of La Marseillaise.

That man is not Nicolas Sarkozy.

Note to Congress: If you Google YouTube – Casablanca – French National Anthem you can view Paul Heinreid, taking his cue from Humphrey Bogart, and ordering the local band at Rick’s to play La Marseillaise, and drowning out the Vichy Swine in the greatest two minutes in the history of electricity.

Suggested reading for Sarko the American and the new torture buffs in Congress and in the Oval Office: Kranz Kafka: In the Penal Colony, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and much more, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux’s: Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, Anti-Memoirs.

Romney's Logo & the New England Patriots- letter to the NYTs, 11/06/07

Here in northern New Hampshire I think we couldn't care less if a candidate is Mormon, Tree Druid or a Zoroastrian Fire Worshiper. The old school worships with the Red Sox and the new school with the New England Patriots. I’m sure I was not the only one dismayed in the last few weeks when the Romney signs started going up to see that Romney's logo is almost identical to that of the New England Patriots. New England has become a different place in the last seven years and frankly, we have become a better people . . . but not because of Romney. That credit goes to Manny and Big Papi and also to Randy Moss, Wes Welker, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. For Romney to attempt to accommodate this energy may be a few degrees away from copyright infringement but it well constitutes a crime against humanity here in New England.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

The Hillary camp's Cajun Cartel surreptitiously proselytizes the draft in WW II "common man" nostalgia (they are 15 years too late) while the Repubs will stay more likely to the current system: For the Dems it is a two-track approach, one travels the land with sentimental stories of heroism by common draftees and parables of great wars, while the central character lies outright. In any case, America has lost its identity to the incipient monarchist incursion of personality cult - Bush, Clinton - and federalism has reached the end of its decent interval.

" . . . 50 more years of war," says General Abizaid. Would be better if they taught the pseudo-monarchs and Generals they send to Oxford as Rhodes scholars something more advanced than sociology and Carroll Quigley: They become, as Toynbee said, imprisoned by their learning rather than awakened by it. Did any of these aparatchiks ever read Kipling? Koestler? Doris Lessing? Malraux?

Indeed, did they read George Kennan, America's greatest ambassador since Franklin, and who, according to a distinguished Vermont professor who spoke to him on his death bed, later in life proposed decentralizing the U.S. into a “dozen constituent republics” including New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the Middle West, the Northwest, the Southwest (including Hawaii), Texas, the Old South, Florida, Alaska, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles: “To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp"?

The West doesn't plan for 50 years. It cannot plan for five years. It is the nature of Hamiltonian federalism; it is from beginning of the rise of northern imperialism in the 1830s (which forced Canada to confederation) to advancing foreign adventures in the 1880s, to the rise to American globalism after WW II entirely a product of rising capital; an angel which has now passed elsewhere. Today capital has reached equilibrium - Wall St. is only one of many brokers and no longer the most important. New York had only three things: Wall St., the Yankees, and The New York Times. Now it has no purpose.

But as New York declines, New England ascends. The Curse was always the shadow of dominance by New York which embittered and incapacitated New England; not since Babe Ruth but since the Civil War. It has been said that the South found its identity in the Civil War. But New England lost hers. Today it awakens, and at the center of Boston there is suddenly a little zen temple named Dice-K.

We have been experiencing an end game since Reagan's passing and the Reagan Presidency itself was a last stand. The monarchist tendency, the Congress of Peeps, the incompetence of fed administrators, the preemptive policy, the failure of the dollar and the view of America abroad as pariah are organic consequences in the natural path of failure.

But things don't ever end; they change. They transform from one thing to the next; they waste their skin. The only defense against waterboarding is New England nationalism. Can we not begin to sell our own New England treasury bonds? Can we send our own representative to the UN?

Profile

Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning magazine writer and has worked more than 30 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and book, movie, music and art reviewer. His essays on politics and world affairs have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and magazines. He has published poetry in Painted Bride Quarterly and has written dozens of magazine articles. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He has written hundreds of columns for "Pundits Blog" in "The Hill" a political journal in Washington, D.C. He lives in the White Mountains with his wife and four children.